Dear Sister Eddy.—Chicago speaks with Boston. Your visit here was prolific of good. Your teachings were the true bread. The soil was ready, and now the harvest is ripening, and the gathering is to be abundant. You have the Truth, and I rejoice to see you stand immovable. Truth, God, Intelligence, is always assailed. We have noted the troubled waters there, and read in our Chicago papers the criticisms and articles of some of Boston's scientists; but we saw the shafts fall harmless at your feet; and we saw how God causes the wrath of man to praise Him, when the truths you teach were not dimmed, but grew brighter, as the files were dulled in contact.
The ire of mortal man is awakened when you teach "All is mind, there is no matter." Your position is correct, and the result of the fierce controversy between opposing thinkers will be to show it true. We see three classes: one claiming " there is no spirit, all is matter;" the second, " there is no matter, all is spirit; " the third, " there is spirit, and there is matter." Only one of these claims is correct, and it is left to right thought to choose which. "If there is both spirit and matter, and they are distinct, or entirely opposite, then one came into existence before the other, and was the producer of the other." I ask this class of believers to tell which took existence first. Was matter before spirit, or spirit before matter? If matter was first, and is not spirit, then matter is self-producing, and self-existing.—Science and Health, by Mary B. G. Eddy. If then, in time past, spirit came into being, it came from or by matter, was made out of matter, hence is matter. Is matter the real, or the potentiality? then it is life-producing, and independent of spirit, having created it. What then is the use or office of spirit? It is secondary, created by and out of matter, and matter is the Creator and Life of all. If matter was the first, and only being, then it created spirit from itself; and if spirit was created out of matter, it is matter; hence all is matter, and there is no spirit. " If spirit, or mind, was first, it was the Life the potential, and being first and the only substance, it created matter out of itself, as there was nothing else to create it from, (Science and Health, by Mary B. G. Eddy); hence if matter was produced out of spirit, it is spirit, it is that out of which it is made therefore, mistake, or error, named it wrong, when it in human blindness called it matter. There is no second or opposite, there is but one. All is God, spirit; hence God is all the universe, which is but one, not two. " Man is the express image and likeness of God, hence man is spirit; and if man is both matter and spirit, God is both matter and spirit, or man is not God's image and like Him. There is but one life, one mind, one soul, and that is God, the all.—Science and Health. " God is not a being or life, and man another being or life." If we are a life, and God is a life, which is most independent of the other? Is " our life hid in God?" then it is not out of God, or separate. It is as Jesus saw it, we in God and God in us. Which is most in the other? We cannot be something apart or separate from God, else we are independent of Life, which is God. Jesus said he was the Father, that the Father and he were one: then he said the Father was greater than he. He knew all was spirit, simply one, not two or separate, any more than the ray is separate from the light that projects it; yet, while the light and the ray are one, the source, or the light, is greater than the ray. A pint or an ocean of water is the same, because both are water, yet not the same, because the ocean is greater than the pint. The difference is quantity not quality. We are all parts of the one whole; we are each of us a ray of life, jet not the Life; we are of it. We are a universe in miniature, as we possess all the elements of nature; hence we are in the likeness of God, as we possess all the elements found in the One, the Eternal Being, the Principle we call God. Who is the prelate that can name before intelligence a single attribute of God that is not also an attribute of the human? Or, who will name an attribute or element of the Evil One—the One Evil—that is not an attribute of the human? God, or Good, is the real, while evil is unreal; hence, the day comes when all will see only Good, as that which is thought to be evil will not be at all. It is not evil now, only as we think so. If the fruit on the lower branches, being undeveloped, is bad, or evil, wait till developed and ripe, then it is all good. The time will come when the Devil, the unreal, the mortal belief, will cease, or be destroyed, while Good alone will remain, the One, by which we mean the Mind, Soul, Life. "Man is not then a substance, or an entity, while God means another substance, or entity," and as the life of the unborn babe is part of the mother's life, so is our life not ours but is simply Life, and Life is God, one and inseparable.
The good, the real, has the throne; so let the temple be seen as swept and garnished, the bride, the Lamb's wife, Love, have entire possession, the Life, the Christ, be sinless, and then God will be recognized as all in all.
